


Beggar's Banquet

by Alexa C (marylex)



Category: Oz (HBO)
Genre: Canon Queer Character, Character of Color, M/M, Polyamory, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-29
Updated: 2007-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-07 19:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marylex/pseuds/Alexa%20C
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Black Widow and <em>El Loco</em> and the Ghost. An Oz fairytale, of sorts.</p><p>Set post-series. Written for the Oz Gift of the Magi Challenge, 2007.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beggar's Banquet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [michele659](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=michele659).



He doesn't look anything like you expect, this slight, unassuming man with the prison years sitting heavy on him, weighting his shoulders, drawing his face thin and sharp, wary. He might have been pretty once, a kind of fresh-washed, well-fed blandness, pink and white, gilt around the edges, before prison put shadows under and behind his eyes. You wouldn't stop on the street now, you think critically - probably wouldn't even notice him. Certainly wouldn't die for him. You expected beautiful, boyish - smooth skin and soulful eyes to go with those lashes, maybe - or someone exotic like Angel, long hair and painted nails and breasts that look almost as real as a girl's.

He's practically legend at this point, an orange-jumpsuited Helen of Troy who's caused prison empires to fall, who's caused _prisons_ to fall, and men to throw away their lives for a taste of his charms. The Black Widow, they call him - mostly the Brotherhood, but others, too - the man who killed two of his men, and a wife before that, ate them alive, turning them against each other for his own purposes.

You can only stand, bemused, as he looks around the pod you've both been assigned, muttering under his breath, and you can only nod as he claims the top bunk.

You didn't expect him to be so ... _twitchy_.

•••

"Where's Beecher?" a voice says, and it's your turn to twitch, but you stand up straight, determined not to show fear.

The guy lounging in the door of your pod, leaning on one arm - this one you've heard about, too, been warned to stay out of his path - _El Loco_, crazy dangerous and hopped up on speed or destiny or some kind of uppers. You heard he let a guy stab him once, just to let him, arranged with him to do the deed. Of course, the guy's dead now, and maybe it was just an excuse. Or maybe not, because they say _El Loco_ doesn't need an excuse, that he'll pull a shank on your shit with no provocation ... no rational provocation, at least. Maybe he's bored, or he didn't like the eggs in the cafeteria that morning, or he didn't like the way you looked at him, or the moon's in the wrong phase. A stone skin traitor, you heard Morial say in the cafeteria, someone who takes out his own kind. He didn't say it very loud, though.

The guy's short, you realize suddenly, shorter than you, with the kind of looks you expected from the Widow, all big dark eyes and warm skin marred only by a thin scar on his cheek.

"Beecher?" he says, again, impatient.

"Appointment with the prison shrink," you say, and the guy nods, and then out of nowhere, he's in the pod, leaning in to you with a sudden fierce expression like he's trying to judge where in your neck to sink his teeth. You fight the urge to step back.

"Don't fuck with him, you hear me?" he says, and you raise your hands in the air to show your harmlessness.

"You were in the Coliseum, at Hart's Run, before they transferred you back here," you say. "Both of you." Neither of them were housed on your tier, but you remember the gossip in the state's new roundhouse prison, only six months open and already over-crowded.

"And Tanner Correctional before that. You ever been set down in a prison where you know maybe five guys to watch your back?"

You look around, through the plexiglass, at the common area and the row of pods on the other side of Em City, and back at him, incredulous.

"Yeah. So. Don't fuck with him."

He takes himself back to his own pod, back to that creepy, freaky partner of his with the bleached hair and the blind eye, the guy who touches him like he'd put an actual leash on him, if he could, who's been watching the whole exchange with malevolent intensity through layers of plexiglass.

_Welcome to Oz_, you tell yourself.

•••

"I'm not shitting you, have you seen the library?" _El Loco_ is lounging again, elbows propped on a table in the cafeteria.

"It's all exactly the same, Alvarez," Beecher says, rolling his eyes as you pass. "They didn't change anything - all they did was spend two years washing the whole place down with bleach, or something."

"Yeah," Alvarez grins, and yeah, you think, he does look kind of crazy around the eyes. "You think maybe we're all gonna die in our beds from whatever it was?"

"With the kind of cheap, half-ass job they probably contracted for?" Beecher says with a sharp laugh. "It wouldn't surprise me. So there you go, someone will do your work for you."

Alvarez places a hand over his heart in a mimicry of pain.

"I told you, I got everything under control," he says, getting to his feet, ignoring Beecher's snort.

"You don't think we're really going to die in our beds, do you?" asks one of the old guys sitting across from Beecher.

"Where would you rather die?" asks the other.

•••

Oz is almost exactly what you expect. It's earned its rep on the street, a kill rate higher than any other prison in the state, and the re-opened Em City is a sweet deal, but your mama taught you early on that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and so you concentrate on being a good soldier as you get your feet under you and try to get a feel for the place and its other inhabitants. The old-timers, the ones who were here before the evacuation, they treat you like fresh meat, and you do your day in the Hole for proving yourself. You may be new to Oz, but your stint in the Coliseum, the years Downstate, the time in juvie before that - they mean you won't be anybody's bitch.

You figure out the fault lines in Em City right away. It's almost claustrophobically small, barely room to move, let alone breathe. Downstate, you were spoiled for choice, but here, you've got a limited number of options. Zahir Arif approaches you a couple of weeks into your stint, but you don't think Allah is for you. You start spending your time with Poet and Walters so you've got someone at your back, but you're just as glad the Latino-Italian axis is apparently re-emerging in the bloody struggle for control of the drug trade in the re-opened prison. It means there's no real expectation for you to be slinging shit. You know yourself well enough to know that if you sling it, you're gonna end up using it, and that's not a place you want to be anymore.

•••

" .. get out of it, away from him," Beecher is saying as you enter your pod from the showers.

"I told you, it's under control," Alvarez says, pacing.

"For how long? Look at you."

"Leave it, Beecher" Alvarez says sharply, with a glance at you.

"Hey." Beecher stops him with a hand on his shoulder. "I'm still just watching your back."

•••

*

You sit back in the drug-counseling group sessions, watching the others spin their tales, work their lies and sometimes their truths, if they've gained enough strength to admit their truths to themselves.

"It's hard, you know?" _El Loco_ says. "When the shit you want is right there, right where you can reach out for it whenever you need it."

"Maybe," says the nun in charge of the session, "you should think about staying out of situations where the 'shit' is right there."

"That sounds like an excellent idea," the Widow says, and you swallow a laugh into a cough.

"Yeah, Mr. Squeaky Clean," says someone across the circle, in a tone of voice that says he's anything but, and Beecher bristles. "Like you want it any less when it's not there."

"And what do you mean by that?" Sister Pete says, probing.

"Just that if you need something - tits, alcohol, love, whatever - taking it away isn't going to change that. You're always gonna want it."

•••

"What are you looking at?" a voice says. "Punk."

You're still being tested in small ways every day, so you'd push back if it was anyone else, but you can't help thinking that taking out an old man would kind of make you a ... well, a punk, so you just stare at him in disbelief.

"Dad, will you shut up? Please? OK? Jesus. I'm sorry. He's just ... off his meds, or something, you know?"

This one is the guy from the counseling sessions, the one you've dubbed the Ghost, a remnant of Em City's past, a shade and a shadow of who he used to be. The old-timers, the ones who were in Oz before, they don't clear out of his way, but they don't get _in_ his way, either, so you figure he must have had some power or pull back in the day. You remember his face and his name, of course, brother of Death Row's most famous resident - ex-resident - but who is he now? Some guy sitting around playing cards and taking shit from his pickled father, writing desperate love letters every week to some woman who won't step foot inside the walls of Oz, a guy who lost his jizz when his brother died? That happens sometimes, you've seen it before, some kind of spark goes out and guys go grey as the industrial paint and concrete that hems all of you in. They keep walking around because they don't know enough to lay down. Maybe they should have put him in the ground with his brother.

You wonder if he even bothers to mail those letters every week.

_Ghost_, you think, dismissive, right up until the day you catch him pocketing a bottle of pills from what should have been a locked cabinet in the infirmary and he looks up to see you, lays a finger over his lips in a quieting gesture, over a smile that chills you to the goddam bone.

_Ghost_, you think, again, only this time you think of darkness and stolen breath and death in the night, and you nod, blank as some small animal mesmerized by a snake, and you back out of the office into the ward, and you never, ever say a thing about it, to anyone. Not even when _El Loco_ takes the fall for both of them, after someone jabbers on the elite pharm business the two of them have been running on the side, out of the infirmary medicine cabinets.

•••

You don't understand how everyone didn't see it coming, but then, everyone doesn't see what you do. You watch, now, because you realize how badly you underestimated O'Reily, and that's the kind of thing that will get you cut, even killed, in prison. You've already got a scar that proves it, and you stupidly thought you'd learned better. Troy would be ashamed of you, you think. It was the first lesson he taught you - half the first lesson he taught you - when he took you under his wing: Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.

So you watch, and so you see, puzzle pieces you try to arrange into a coherent picture: The way O'Reily's mouth tightens as his father mumbles "fag" under his breath when Beecher passes. The way O'Reily grabs the old man's elbow as he helps him to his feet and back to their pod, hard, harsh, anger and concern and desperation all in his grasp. The way he crowds into _El Loco_'s space, as if daring him to touch, to push, to shove. The way he ghosts out from under the Widow's hands when Beecher reaches out to him. The way Beecher hesitates, awkward, always so awkward, like he has to make a conscious decision, as if he's thinking over whether or not he _should_ touch before he reaches out to O'Reily or lays his hands on _El Loco_ ... on _Alvarez_. The way _El Loco_ is Alvarez with Beecher, or maybe even Miguel. The way Miguel speaks in group about trying to find some kind of stable ground under his feet.

You watch, and so you see: The Black Widow and _El Loco_ in the laundry room, intent, heads together, Beecher raising that hesitant hand, committing himself, smoothing his thumb over the thin scar as Alvarez tilts his face - hungry, always so hungry - into the touch. You see Alvarez slide from his perch on one of the washing machines to stand close, see him grab Beecher's wrist when Beecher tries to step back, half turns away; you see the fingers of his free hand flutter over Beecher's brow, his cheekbone, come to rest on his lips, shockingly intimate, before the hack bangs on the plexiglass, telling them to break it up. You see them pull apart, both suddenly awkward, but not soon enough, not before you see the look on Torquemada's face as he stands watching from the entrance arch to Em City.

You're not sure who to warn. How much will Beecher care if another protector is killed? If Alvarez wasn't crazy, wouldn't he stay away from Beecher in the first place?

•••

Beecher and O'Reily fight after Alvarez is hauled off to solitary, O'Reily ghosting out of the woodwork, Beecher on the offensive - a nasty rabbit punch to O'Reily's ribs before he backs off, hands raised in the air to show the hacks he's harmless, then low vicious words underneath a staircase when they think everyone's attention has waned.

"... _thinking_, getting involved in ... know what he's like ..."

" ... should be talking to ... not the one who ... you care, anyway ... "

" ... shit with me, don't try to pretend ... just because _you_ ..."

" ... happened ... nothing ever ..."

" ... once to be your brother ..."

" ... what _we_ did ... fucking hands off me ..."

"... fucking problem lately, O'Reily ..."

"... trust you? Is that what Keller thought when you ..."

Beecher's head jerks back like he's been slapped, fists clenching again as O'Reily makes some vague gesture to the top railing of Em City, saying something you can't make out. Beecher's response is clear enough, though - you're no lip-reader, but _motherfucking cunt_ is pretty easy to figure out, and he pushes O'Reily away.

"What are you looking at?" O'Reily spits the words as he shoves by you on the way to his own pod.

_I'd be afraid of him, too, if he wanted me_, you think, reflecting on dead men, a dead wife, on Alvarez sitting in isolation.

•••

**

Alvarez is more than half-crazy when he comes back, long red scratches on his arms and his neck, wild-eyed and muttering about conversations with his grandfather. You know the silent, patient man who works the hospital ward on your shift is his father, and so you wonder if his grandfather is in Oz, too.

"He _was_," Poet says. "He's dead, now."

You watch Alvarez sitting on his bunk, rocking slightly, arms crossed over his chest, and you're not the only one - there's an audience gathering outside his plexiglass wall, guys standing around or slowing down as they walk past. Beecher slams a palm against the wall and tells them to fuck off, and he looks a little bit loco, himself. From your vantage point, you watch the way he crouches in front of Alvarez, the way he reaches out, the way Alvarez grabs his hand like a drowning man going under for the third time.

You get a new podmate after that. Word is that Alvarez rolled on Torquemada's D-Tab business in return for a ticket out of solitary, back to Em City.

"Tit for tat," Walters says.

"Tat for tits," Poet says.

"Shoulda kept his mouth shut," Walters says.

It's not as if anyone really liked Torquemada all that much. Fiona sulks at the decline in the gay power base, and you buy her one of those soap roses that a guy in Unit J carves to fund his black-market cigarette habit, and then she flutters around you and tells everyone what a gentleman you are, although she's still out of sorts. Meanwhile, Torquemada's gone, disappeared into solitary or Gen Pop or some other rathole section of Oz, Beecher's holed up with Alvarez, and you've got a scared kid in your pod, barely old enough to buy the gun he used in his botched hold-up of a neighborhood bodega. You consider offering him to Fiona to use as a lace hanky.

•••

All the time you've spent watching bears unexpected fruit.

"Pancamo will be pleased," you say, studiedly casual.

You're bored, you think later. It's not like you have any stake in the drug alliances in Em City, don't really care if the Italian-Latino axis falls apart now that Chucky can shake off both Torquemada and Alvarez. It's not like you believe Poet and Walters can hold it together long enough to become real players, anyway.

It's just that shit-disturbing was always kind of your downfall.

•••

You've learned that Alvarez and O'Reily play poker, but Beecher prefers checkers - although what he really wants is someone who'll play chess with him. You sit down in the empty chair on the other side of the board, pushing one of the white pieces ... is it a knight? ... diagonally.

"You playin' yourself?" you ask him.

"Yes, if you must know." He pauses, looks at the board. "Did you just _accidentally_ manage a checkmate?"

"I don't know, did I?" You squint at the board, then grin at him before you lean forward. "Can you keep him out of it, now that Torquemada's gone? Is he going to be a problem?"

He studies you before spreading his hands, palms up.

"I'll talk to him," he says.

You can almost feel the political geography of Em City shift, start re-forming itself under your feet.

•••

It was the muttering that always drove you nuts - locked in the pod you shared, a countdown of four hours 'til lights-out with the low monotonous hum as Beecher worked his way through one of his legal arguments like he was going to be declaiming in front of some judge or jury of his former peers, instead of typesetting in the computer room the next day, struggling to make out his own painfully crabbed handwriting. You don't miss the muttering. Neither would at least three of the other people in the library, who've hissed at him to "shut the fuck _up_, already," by the time he startles like some feral dog at the touch on the back of his neck, raising his pen like a weapon as he turns, before he realizes it's O'Reily's palm half-cupped around his nape. He bats the touch away in irritation but not before - you think - you catch him lean into it, almost imperceptibly, the way Alvarez leans into Beecher's touches, hungry, always so hungry. They all spend so much time fighting their addictions.

O'Reily drags two fingers along the tabletop like a schoolgirl playing seductress, and you almost expect him to bat his eyelashes as he drops into the chair at the end of the table. You slouch in your own seat, eyeing them over the top of your magazine.

"That Burchett's appeal?"

"For all the good it's going to do him." Beecher grinds the heels of his hands into his eyesockets, hard, like he can grind out the weariness back there behind his eyes; when his hands fall, he meets O'Reily's gaze head-on. "We're gonna lose. _He's_ gonna lose. I can't stop it."

"Nah, you can't talk like that." Ryan's fingers are twitching, restless. "You're gonna pull some amazing lawboy magic, and those guys at your dad's law firm, they'll convince the judge."

"OK, Ryan." Beecher's laugh is sharp and rueful, full of the knowledge of needles and gas and electricity and all the other bitter little tools at the state's disposal when it comes to dealing with prisoners.

"You know, I kind of miss your glasses."

"Shut up, O'Reily."

They sit in silence for a minute.

"They're gonna kill him, aren't they?"

"Ryan, you don't even know the guy ..."

"It's just that ..." O'Reily looks around, and you have to clamp down on the urge to lean forward to catch his next words. "... first time since ... don't think I can ... my dad ..."

You're not sure, but you think Beecher's fingertips brush O'Reily's before he sits back and picks up his pen.

•••

You pound your wall with the others when the clock hits midnight on the execution date. You'd used tin cups Downstate, ringing against the metal of bunks and bars, but you like the way this feels, your plexiglass cage bowing under your fist, you like the way it sounds, the rolling thunder of righteousness and rage circling, flowing through all of you, binding you, if only for a moment.

O'Reily's face is blank, and, _ghost_, you think, but he looks like could he put his fist through the wall with the violence behind his blows. Next door, Beecher and Alvarez are pounding, too, a rhythmic counterpoint knocking, but all of Beecher's attention is on O'Reily. As the last of the pounding dies away like the remnants of a storm, you can see him lay his palm flat against the wall between them, prison handshake met by O'Reily on the other side.

•••

"There's _shit_ on this TV," Walters says.

"I can't believe they cancelled Miss Sally again," Poet says.

"I miss Miss Sally," you say.

"You had Miss Sally Downstate?"

"It's another part of the _state_, not Russia," you say, turning your disbelief on Urbano.

"I miss Nooter."

"I thought Nooter was a fag?"

"Shut up, Beecher," O'Reily says and kicks at Beecher's chair. "It's always gotta be the gay thing with you."

Beecher gives him the finger.

Seamus O'Reily mutters something and stalks off to the pod he shares with his son.

"Have a nice day." Beecher waves cheerily at his departing back. "I don't think that man approves of me."

"Well, then, you're even, aren't you?"

"What?"

"Beecher, you can't stand my father."

"That's not true!"

"Yeah." Alvarez doesn't bother taking his eyes off the TV screen or the lollipop out of his mouth. "It is."

•••

You're on the ward when they bring in Seamus O'Reily, sweaty and pale on the stretcher, head lolling, gasping for breath, and you're only surprised it took this long for the heart attack to hit. He's grabbing for support - physical, mental, emotional - as they roll him past, and his hand closes on your sleeve, but there's no strength in it, and they pull him away, and he's gone. Two of the nurses rush past you, one shoving you out of the way, a quick skip-leap over the tail of dirty sheets you're trailing, to join the swarm around him, and someone grabs your shoulder, hard this time, pulling you around. _El Loco_ swears, impatient, as he asks you where Ryan is, where O'Reily is, and you wave toward the dispensary. He shoves you in that direction, some of his urgency communicating itself to you like a virus, and you drop the bundle of sheets and double-time it.

O'Reily looks up with the guilt of someone who's only sorry to be caught when you bang open the metal mesh door, but he drops the open bottle of pills he's holding without a second thought, sending them skittering, crunching underfoot, when you tell him - _your father_, and, _Alvarez said_, and, _it looks bad_.

Seamus is still flailing, wheezing for breath, when the two of you get there, and O'Reily shoves his way into the press of bodies, only to be grabbed by Armstrong, all in hack-black like an angel of death, and he struggles until Alvarez grabs him from the side, wraps an arm around his chest, holding him still. One of the machines starts a high-pitched whine, and Seamus - rather undramatically, really - goes limp. _Cardiac arrest_, you hear Dr. Prestopnik say, and O'Reily swears, and Alvarez is holding him _up_ by this point, while speaking in low urgent tones to the priest who's materialized on the ward. You can hear Alvarez pleading, hear Beecher's name, and Mukada's mouth quirks oddly, but he finally nods, looking over at Seamus, and practically runs from the infirmary.

Seamus has gone down for the third time by the time he gets back, Beecher in tow, Murphy completing the black-suited escort, and from your angle at the opposite door, you see Prestopnik shake his head at Em City's head hack - _no good, he's gone_ \- and Murphy's responding head shake of not-quite regret. Alvarez turns away, toward his own father, who pats his cheek as O'Reily, released, pushes his way to the bedside.

"You were with him, Ryan, you were there when he went, he wasn't alone."

You hear Beecher later, soothing soft rise and fall of words, as you pass the doctor's office, and you glance inside to see him crouched in front of O'Reily, hand cupping the back of his head as O'Reily pitches forward to hide his face in Beecher's chest. Beecher looks up and nods, mouth set in a thin line, and you look around to see Alvarez.

"Walk on," he tells you, folding his arms across his chest, so you shrug and move away, leaving him standing sentinel.

•••

"It's like a tripod," _El Loco_ says to you, and _shit_, you think to yourself, and _this motherfucker really is crazy_, because really, what the fuck? You're just trying to watch the news.

"A tripod?' you say carefully.

"Yeah, man. See, with a tripod, one of the legs might not be carrying a whole lot of weight - might not be carrying it's _fair share_ of the weight - so everything's a little wobbly, right?" He feigns a bobble on a tightrope, arms weaving in the air. "But you still need it for balance. So. You know."

"No?" You're not sure what the correct answer is, here. You fight the instinctive urge to slide your chair away from his.

"So you can't get rid of it, or everything falls. Falls right over, right?" He explains this in a tone suggesting he's imparting a great secret of the universe.

You wonder if he's trying to convince you or himself.

•••

"Don't take him an orange. That's fucked-up."

"O'Reily, he's gotta eat _something_. It's an orange. It's healthy. It's portable."

"Ain't nothing in this prison healthy," Poet says.

"Nobody asked you, Arnold," O'Reily says.

"Anyway, it's the only fruit they got today."

"What's so fucked-up about taking the man an orange?" you ask, holding out your tray for chicken nuggets.

"It's nothing," Alvarez says. "He just ... gets like this around this time every year. He'll be over it in a few days."

"Fucked _up_, man." Poet shakes his head as O'Reily and Alvarez move down the line, and you wonder again about how fast Oz can drive you crazy, what the fuck is wrong with the place. You think of Dee, of strong hands braiding your hair, more gentle than your mother's ever were, of those gentle fingers twined with Troy's, sun slanting across their faces on the yard Downstate, and you wonder who's supposed to be the crazy ones.

•••

Beecher laughs, a little hysterically, and you look up from your magazine to see him, still burrowed in the blankets of his bunk, turning the orange in his hands.

•••

You're on the ward when they bring in Alvarez, spitting and cursing, hands and chest and sweat-shirt soaked with blood. He's flailing with the hand that's not clutching at his stomach, a nurse and two hacks trying to push him flat, and he hits you in the chest as they roll him past, a square-on smack, leaving you staring blankly at the bloody splotch on your shirt until your body gears up, muscles responding to instinct before your brain can process any information. You're moving without thinking, down the aisle of beds, through the swinging doors and into the long-term-care section where O'Reily's handing out pudding cups, swearing at Jorgensen for trying to scam an extra butterscotch serving.

_Alvarez_, you say, and you don't know what else to tell him, don't know how bad it is - it looked like an awful lot of blood, but you've seen guys make a hell of a mess before getting up and walking out after a handful of stitches, and you've seen guys die from a clean thrust in the right spot with hardly a mark on them. What kind of guess can you make about a guy who's let somebody stab him in the past, anyway? O'Reily looks confused but you can tell when he sees the blood on your chest, you see him go pale, sick-looking, and he shoves the tray at you, pushing his way through the doors, back the way you came.

Alvarez is still cursing, a low steady stream of English and Spanish, cutting off with a guttural yell as Dr. Ranier presses to one side of the wound - anyone who can make that much noise surely can't be dying, you think - and you can see a slow well of fresh crimson against the darkening smears drying on Alvarez's skin. O'Reily's cursing too, and pacing, and he grabs the priest as soon as he hits the doors, but Mukada's already fighting his own way to the bedside, leaving Sister Pete to deal with O'Reily's frantic demands that somebody, _anybody_ go find Beecher.

"He's going to be OK," you say later, to O'Reily, the two of you watching Beecher stand at the foot of the bed where Alvarez is sleeping, knocked out. Beecher's hands are white-knuckled in the foot of the blanket.

"Yeah. I don't think they were even trying to kill him."

"Maybe they were just bad at it."

"No. It was a warning," he says and pushes through the doors to stand at Beecher's shoulder.

•••

"O'Reily did him."

"What are you talking about?" you ask Poet as you hold out your tray for the reconstituted cardboard mush that serves as mashed potatoes in Oz. "O'Reily was in the infirmary with me when it happened."

"Don't mean he didn't have him done."

"Wouldn't be the first time a couple of guys started killing each other over Beecher," Walters points out.

•••

"Could have been the Italians," Poet says thoughtfully.

"I thought it was O'Reily," you say, holding out your tray for the rubbery scrambled eggs.

"Could have been O'Reily," Walters agrees, nodding. "Not that it will do him any good. Alvarez ain't letting Beecher go. Not when he's got him inked into his skin."

"What?"

"That tattoo, man, that spider he's got on the back of his shoulder. You know, the black widow."

"That was for Beecher?" You can't help asking, in spite of yourself.

"Shut up, that ain't no spider. It's a grasshopper," Poet says. "And he already had it."

"The fuck are you talking about, a grasshopper? It's a spider."

"Don't listen to his shit," Poet says, making a dismissive sound. "He likes to act like he knows what he's talking about."

•••

"... Torquemada."

"Let me guess," you say, holding out your tray for something you'd like to think at least started its life as a leafy green vegetable before being reduced to a grayish mush.

"I'm telling you, it was O'Reily," Walters says, banging his spoon against the side of the metal serving vat.

"Alvarez says he didn't see the guy."

"Well, whoever did it was only working for someone else, anyway. You think anybody in this prison gets their own hands dirty?"

"O'_rei_ly," Walters sing-songs.

•••

Alvarez hasn't been back in Em City three days when you look up from a magazine, and you see: Alvarez in the pod that Beecher and O'Reily have shared since Seamus died, crouched at the bottom bunk, intent, as Beecher tilts his head, slight furrow between his brows, concentrating on the words. You see Alvarez trace the knuckles of one of Beecher's hands where they rest on his thighs, see the way he studies their interlaced fingers rather than looking up to meet Beecher's eyes. You see Beecher raise a hand to rest on his shoulder, smooth up the curve of his neck to tilt his face into view, run a thumb along the line of his jaw. You see Alvarez lean up, forward, see their lips touch, and you realize that in all this time, it's the first time you've actually seen them kiss, the first time neither of them has bothered to hide.

You can't figure out what's going on, and neither can Beecher, judging by his expression as he stands in the door of the pod, watching Alvarez cross the common area.

"What are you up to, _mano_?" you ask as he walks by, but he ignores you.

"We need to talk," he says to O'Reily.

O'Reily looks at you. Alvarez looks at you. You look back.

"Come on," O'Reily says, pushing away from the table.

You look back at Beecher, who's shifted away from the door of his pod but is still standing, pacing, puzzled, occasionally glancing out through the wall, past you, where O'Reily and Alvarez are having a low, mumbled conversation that ends with the scrape of a chair and O'Reily's harsh voice saying "Fuck that." When you turn to look, he's in Alvarez's face.

"... gonna do?" you hear, as O'Reily gets progressively louder. " ... up to him ... shank in him? ... happen to you? ... think you're just gonna get your ass thrown in solitary? ... on Death Row, you dumb motherfucker. Nuh-uh. No. Way. Alvarez." He punctuates each word with a finger jabbed in Alvarez's shoulder. "I'm not going through that. Not again. I'm not going through it, and I'm not going to deal with Beecher going through it."

" ... _know_ he'll go after Beecher next," you hear Alvarez hiss. "It's not about the goddam D-Tabs for him."

"You let _me_ take care of this. You suck at it."

The hand Alvarez puts out might be intended as a placating gesture, but O'Reily slaps it away, and now they're drawing more attention. You see Meaney push back a chair, Santino lean forward in his; these guys might have carved a place for themselves outside the normal hierarchy, but in times of stress, Em City fractures along its standard faultlines.

"Oh no," _El Loco_ says, grinning, shaking his head, putting up his hands. "I got you, O'Reily. I know what you're doing. You want me to hit you, so they can put me in the cage or the Hole and I can't do what I gotta do."

"What?" O'Reily makes a disbelieving sound. "Nah, man. I .. OK, fine. You got me. Whatever."

He shrugs it off, and you can see the barest slackening of tension in Alvarez's shoulders before O'Reily feints, takes off toward his pod, yells that Beecher's boyfriend is going to get himself put back in solitary or worse.

"God _dammit_," Alvarez says, standing in the middle of the floor, and it's almost comical.

There's yelling after that - _Nobody's fucking killing anybody_, Beecher's voice rising above the others - and poking of fingers into each other's faces and shoulders, and a little bit of shoving. The hacks break them up once, reducing them to hissing whispers, before Alvarez says something and the kid who's Beecher's latest project, some guy they gave him to sponsor a few months back, hauls off and pops O'Reily in the face, for some reason. You're not sure why, but you don't doubt he deserves it for something. You're watching for the sheer entertainment value, by this time, chin propped in hand - it's better than anything you get on prison TV, even with cable - but Murphy's had enough, and the hacks haul them all up to McManus' office, where the blinds go down before they get to any of the good parts.

•••

Torquemada's death, when it comes, is almost an afterthought. No one sees it. No one hears it. They never figure out who's responsible.

"Really? That's a shame," says O'Reily in a tone of voice that means it's anything but, when Meaney drops by their table in the Em City common area to update them. He shuffles the cards again.

You watch him as he deals, hold him in your gaze until he looks up to meet your eyes. He smiles at you, a smile that chills you to the goddam bone, and, _ghost_, you think.

•••

You're putting away your laundry and so you don't see the start of it, don't even know anything's going on until there's a sudden explosion of bodies and noise and movement slamming into the wall of your pod and, _Jesus Christ_, you think, _what the fuck?_ as half your socks land around you. Alvarez has got O'Reily pinned up against the outside of your wall, demanding to know what the _fuck_ is wrong with him, and you wonder how fast he moved, because O'Reily doesn't have the muscle Alvarez is packing but he's got a longer reach and, you can bet, a bunch of nasty tricks. Beecher's still sitting where you assume this whole thing started, looking like someone kicked his dog, and you make a quizzical gesture, tilt your head, but all you get is a shrug and a tired sigh.

"Seriously, man, what is your problem? Why you always gotta act like an asshole?" Alvarez asks, and now the hacks have shown up, Murphy pulling him off of O'Reily, pulling them apart, and Alvarez shakes them off. "What the fuck, man, don't touch me. Don't worry, I won't touch him again. I won't lay a fucking _finger_ on him."

"We're cool. Everything's cool," O'Reily says, but the hacks have barely dispersed before Alvarez grabs him by the collar of his T-shirt - laying far more than a finger on him, you reckon - and drags him under the nearby staircase. You lounge in the door of your pod, trying to act casual.

"All right, O'Reily, what the hell's wrong with you?" Alvarez hisses. "You're being a pain in my ass. Is there some reason you're being a pissy little bitch?"

"What do you care, anyway, Alvarez?"

"What do I care? What do I _care_?" He's back in O'Reily's face, twisting the front of O'Reily's T-shirt in his fists. "This thing we got, the thing we all got - that's _mi familia_ now, O'Reily. Our _familia_. I bled for it. You _killed_ for it. What we got is each other, _hermano_. That's all we got."

"You don't even _like_ me," O'Reily says, bringing up his own hands to push at Alvarez's wrists. "You wouldn't even want me around if Beecher didn't."

"O'Reily ..." Alvarez stops and sighs, flattening his palms against O'Reily's chest. "Would I have imagined this? No. Would I have chosen it? Probably not. But it's what we got, right? Right?"

He holds O'Reily's gaze, fierce, moment lengthening, until O'Reily nods, and then he leans in and kisses him, sliding a hand up his chest to cup his cheek, tilt his face. O'Reily makes a soft, broken sound into his mouth and leans in, pressing their bodies together.

You remember hearing Alvarez was the only one in the entire damn prison who managed to train one of those seeing-eye dogs, but that he charmed it until it would sit up and eat out of his hand. Maybe he's half-wolf, himself, you think. Maybe O'Reily is, too. Maybe they all are, these _loco_ motherfuckers, like wolves looking for a pack, a place to belong. They don't belong anywhere else, so they create this new place between them, and you can't figure out exactly how they all fit together, you just know they do. You can't understand the confusion they create in Oz, because if you could find something like this, if you knew where to start looking for it in this fucking insane asylum, you'd sink in your teeth and never let go. Hungry, always so hungry.

Alvarez is pushing O'Reily now, pinning him again, and you can see O'Reily's hand fist in the shoulder of Alvarez's shirt, stretching it, can see his fingers slip in against the bare flesh and taut tendons of Alvarez's shoulder and neck. He bucks, and Alvarez grabs him by one hip, one wrist, slams him back against the wall, pausing with his face pressed into O'Reily's shoulder as O'Reily's free hand hovers and finally buries itself in the short hair at the back of his skull. Alvarez stretches up, whispers something you can't hear in O'Reily's ear, and you think O'Reily shudders before Alvarez buries his face in O'Reily's neck and O'Reily makes a sharp sound, bitten-off, clenches his fingers in Alvarez's hair, yanks his head back.

_Bit him_, you think.

They shove at each other, hips pushing, hands pulling, and Alvarez gets his thigh between O'Reily's legs, gets a hand between their bodies, doing something you can't see but can surely guess at. O'Reily's hand skids across the back of Alvarez's shirt before his fingers dig into the muscles of Alvarez's back, and his head tilts against the wall, face turning up to the shadowed ceiling or the unseen sky.

Maybe you're all just wolves looking for a pack, you think, turning on each other when you find yourselves in a trap instead, gnawing off legs and tails. None of you can help being crazy, all you can hope is that there's someone who can pin you to the wall and support you through the freakout, however they can.

You shift, and you see Beecher standing at the door of his own pod, looking out. You wave to get his attention, and when he looks your way, you point to the staircase and give him a thumbs up.

He lifts a hand in acknowledgment.


End file.
